Researcher Impact

Demonstrating your research impact is becoming increasingly important in the research landscape. There are several methods for demonstrating your research impact.

The h-index is arguably the most well known measure of research impact and assesses publication output and citation-based impact simultaneously.

Citation reports are another method to interpret research impact by creating a profile of your research outputs.

Esteem measures can be incorporated into applications for grants or promotions and reflect 'esteem' rather than citation based quantitative measures.

In order to determine researcher impact it is important to ensure you have a complete and accurate reflection of your publication and research activities. Keeping up to date with your author profiles such as your public Google Scholar profile, Scopus Author ID, Researcher ID (Web of Science) and ORCID iD will allow you to gather accurate researcher bibliometrics.

ORCID® (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
Flinders University supports ORCID® (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID has integrations with Scopus Author ID and Researcher ID which allows you to easily push and pull your publications information to and from ORCID while simultaneously updating your Scopus Author ID and Researcher ID profiles. Sign up for ORCID @ Flinders through Flinders University and follow the instructions on how to update your ORCID record.

You can use Scopus, Web of Science and your Google Scholar profile to find your h-index. Remember these databases have different coverage so use the one that makes you look the best!

Training & support videos and help

A citation report provides details on the publications a researcher has authored and the number of times those works have been cited.

Citation reports can be run in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Scopus

Click on Author Search.

Type your last name and your initial and click Search.

Select the names that match your name.

Click on Show Documents to see your publications and how they were cited in Scopus.

Click on Select All and then View Citation Overview.

You will see your H-Index.

Scopus only calculates citations received since 1996

Web of Science

Using the Search function, type the name of a known author. For an author that published under different initials, make sure you include all the initials to retrieve all the published papers in the Web of Science. E.g. For the author Smith JA, search for smith j* OR smith a*.

On the results page, on the right hand side above the results, click on Create Citation Report to see the citation analysis for the author.

The Citation Report gives the numbers for published items in each year, citations in each year, total citations, average citations per item, and the h-index.

Also, remember that if you have books or papers in non-Web of Science indexed journals or in older indexed journals before they were included in the Web of Science, you need to add them manually to your h-index calculation.

Google Scholar

Publish or Perish is a free software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations using data from Google Scholar.

Publish or Perish calculates:

total number of papers

total number of citations

average number of citations per paper/book

average number of citations per author

the h-index

other metrics

Esteem measures may provide additional evidence of research quality and/or research capacity. These measures may be considered in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative and may be relevant for competitive grant applications and academic promotions. In addition to citations, you may like to include esteem measures in any grant or promotion application.

Esteem measures eligible for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) are:

Editor of a prestigious work of reference

Fellowship of a learned academy and membership of AIATSIS

Recipient of a nationally competitive research fellowship

Membership of a statutory committee

Recipient of an Australia Council grant or Australia Council fellowship